Check out this amazing post by Jeroen Beeksman, Why Not Print Buildings?, over at The Pop-up City. It spotlights Italian inventor Enrico Dini and his investigations in large-scale three-dimensional printing. Dini is literally printing whole buildings… “London-based architect Andrea Morgante has joined Dini to produce the first 3D-printed building ever, a pavilion to be built in the nearby town of Pontedera.” According to Beeksman’s post, the printed structure is faster, cheaper, and more eco-friendly than traditional construction. Maybe printing isn’t such outdated technology afterall.
The project was featured in Blueprint Magazine’s article The World’s First Printed Building by Tim Abrhams. It’s definitely worth reading. And below is a video that Beeksman included in his post. I don’t speak Italian and have no explanation for the hostess who introduces the segment on Dini- Lady Gaga meets Mad Max. Maybe one of bilingual readers can shed some light on the subject…
There’s been a lot of talk in the past months about Avatar, the James Cameron CGI blockbuster. Even if you haven’t seen it (which I admit I haven’t), you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard about the film and its digitally-generated, blue-skinned stars, the Na’vi. The recent announcement of nine Academy Awards nominations including art direction and visual effects (not to mention best picture) has put the film back in the spotlight.
What does any of this have to do with Printeresting? Well, the production company Legacy Effects actually used 3D printing to generate models to test lighting for every scene in the movie. The technology was supplied by Objet Geometries, manufacturer of ultra-thin-layer, high-resolution 3D printing systems for rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing. Printing technology helping to win Oscars… who knew?
The “Print Clock” is a system of dating prints developed by S. Blair Hedges, Professor of Biology at Penn State. The method depends on the supposition that printing surfaces deteriorated at a clock-like rate.
The print clock is a method for dating undated books and prints that were produced by hand-operated presses, thus since the 15th Century. It is based on the hypothesis, backed by observations, that woodblocks and metal plates (e.g., copperplates) deteriorated in a clock-like manner during their lifespan, which was often decades… By measuring this change across different editions of the same print, and calibrating the rate with dated editions, it is possible to estimate the age of the undated work.
From a printmaker’s perspective, the most interesting thing about this (aside from these sweet diagrams) is the conclusions Hedges has drawn about how printing matrices become worn.
Aging of the wood creates breaks in the relief of a carved woodblock, causing line breaks on the resulting print. For copperplates, the image fading I measured is the result of the thinning of the etched and engraved lines caused by the erosion of the copper surface, which results from the steady corrosive effects of acid in the atmosphere plus the periodic removal of the accumulated corrosion by scouring and polishing of the plates prior to each print run… The assumption in published papers in this field was that prints from later editions of the same copperplate are paler because the enormous pressures in the printing process were flattening the copperplate, but my laboratory studies proved that this is not the case.
This Prepeat printer uses rewritable plastic sheets to “reduce operating costs.”
Really, though, you spend $5,000 on this machine, and then you just waste your days watching it work its magic. Print/erase/print/erase/print/erase/print/erase… next thing you know your company’s bankrupt.
MOMA and the Art Group have rolled out a new print on demand kiosk located just outside the upstairs exhibition galleries. The kiosk as a touch screen that allows users to scroll through a database of images from current exhibitions and the permanent collection, choose an image, a mat and a frame and have the package mailed to your home address.
I’m not sure what to make of this, it seems both weird and convenient. While the interface is easy to use, the actual kiosk could use some work, as it looks like an airport ticket dispenser, not so innovative.
A few clicks and a framed print will be hanging above the ol’ hearth. In the image below you can see examples of work from the Bauhaus show, the image quality is very good.
To read more about this topic, check out this article by JD Jarvis hosted here by the museum of computer art.
MAKE magazine profiles Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy, a new project by graduate students from MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. “In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients…This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but it also allows the user to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.”
Plotter Drawings from the 1960’s is an online exhibition at Berlin’s Digital Art Museum. Calling it an exhibition of drawings is certainly justified, but as a collection of editionable and printed images, this show is also a link in the printmaking evolutionary* chain. While plotters are definitely not the same as large-format color printers of today, they are a crucial first step toward the utilization of computers as a tool for making substantially-sized digital printworks.
Vera Molnar, Interruptions, 1968/69, open series, 28.5 x 28.5 cm
Edward Zajec, ”Prostor2″, 1969.
* To clarify, I’m only using the word “evolutionary” in the linear sense; I’m not suggesting that newer media is superior. After all, this post is on a site dedicated to printmaking.
What if instead of wasting tons of single color cans of spray paint, graffiti artists and other spray paint enthusiasts took a note from the printing industry and switched to single can with refillable CMYK paint chambers? Couldn’t tons of waste be avoided? This was the starting premise for the South Korean Design team of Young-suk Kim, Jin-ho Oh, Yong Lee and Woo-sik Kim, who came up with the snappy prototype you see here. You’all note the two dials near the top of the can, one adjusts hue and the other for brightness.
All I want for Christmas is a digital printer that outputs a full spectrum of reflective colors. And a team of elves is hard at work on my Christmas Wish!
Reproducing that variation in printed images has been beyond the capabilities of even the best colour printers. Now an international team of computer scientists says that could soon change thanks to a printer that can reproduce sheen as well as colour…
In time, I imagine, this capability will be available in desktop printers. So that poster you’re working on? You know the one I mean, that one with the kick-ass pearlescent skull, and the shiny gold unicorn? It won’t need to be a screenprint after all! So good luck with that.
To produce a full range of reflectivity the team needed 12 inks: cyan, metallic cyan, magenta, metallic magenta, yellow, metallic gold, black, metallic silver, gold foil, silver foil, finish and primer. They swapped individual cartridges and printed over images several times to produce the final product. By overlaying up to six inks, the team worked out how to represent a spectrum of colours with a wide range of reflectivities.
According to this New Scientist article 
